I’ve
been brainstorming for several months now on a title of a new web page for my
new semi-retirement business. Over these
last few weeks the title “How to Get There From Here?” keeps
coming to mind. As an
organizational/systems consultant and a trainer, I’m always thinking about how
to create environments where people can look into the future and identify their
Vision of how they want things to be.
Once that becomes clear, I can design a framework to facilitate their working
together to see the steps it will take to get there. Along the way, we always look at the forces
at play at a given time: those things that will propel the group forward toward
their vision and those things which may block them from making progress. It’s the same for individuals as well, sort
of like, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
In
addition to thinking up titles, I’ve found myself having to re-work my “new”
business Vision more than once. At my
age, at 74, I have a wealth of experience and some 40+ years of professional
work life behind me. As a consultant, I
was able to work in various arenas and sectors learning about myriad and
diverse occupations. Banking, insurance,
higher education, health and hospitals, manufacturing, mental health,
non-profits, technology, theatre management, communications, and airport
maintenance. I’ll stop there; the list
is too long. With Kansas City being a
federal regional headquarters, I was exposed to many federal agencies and at
times traveled in the 4 states that make up the region.
I also
loved working with individuals on self-management competencies, personal and professional
development, and in three cases worked with colleges/ universities for periods
of time on the theme of Women and Leadership. From
working with employees, supervisors, managers, CEOs, Boards of Directors, and
small groups of individuals desiring to explore and discover a Vision for their
organizations as well as their own lives, I found that a major theme was always
– for me the trainer and facilitator – how to HELP THEM get from where they
were at any given time, in any given situation, to where they wanted to be.
So why
am I having difficulty defining my “new” business Vision? I was gung-ho at first, thinking of all the
things I could “do for systems” and how I could be a catalyst for change in my
own Kansas City. The first volunteer work I did
as a young suburban housewife (1966-1972) and the last thing I did while
working for the Mayor of Kansas City for 4 years (2004-2007) was to work in
neighborhoods.
Both times, the context
was the urban core. The first time was
during the 60s and the Civil Rights Movement in an inner-city church Parish;
the second time was related to Public Safety and Neighborhood Livability as
citizens worked against enormous odds in a context of violence, drugs, gangs,
unemployment, poverty, transient families, abandoned houses, absentee
landlords, and cultural enclaves from many nations trying to adapt to their new
home with its own “foreign culture.”
Add to
this, the economic bottom dropped out in the fall of 2008 and non-profits began
to fail, government grants dried up, and cities and states began to handle huge
deficits. And of course, we know what
has happened since President Obama was elected and the congressional elections
of 2010 happened. Our nation – and the
world – is in the worse shape it’s been in for many years. Not only has the economy tanked, but as
happened in the 20s and 30s, and again in the 60s and early 70s, many American citizens are
waking up to what is happening beyond their neighborhoods, their jobs, their
family activities and saying “What just happened?” It’s like waking up from a bad dream and
thinking, “Well, I thought someone was supposed to be taking care of that… (again) What just happened?”
Add to
that, citizens in many nations are standing up and doing their best to “throw
off the yoke” of those who have held power for many decades and have held power
with a heavy and often military oppression of the masses. Here in America, we thought “we” were the
“good guys.” We would step in, thinking
we were the “saviors” because not only were we the good guys, but also because we
were the most powerful in money and in weapons.
All of a sudden the world isn’t as stable as we thought it was. We, here in the U.S., felt secure and
protected. We felt superior in many ways
and didn’t pay much attention to the corruption that was going on under our noses.
In
other words, more people than ever, around the world, are asking this question:
“How do We Get from Here to There?” How
do we disengage from this “mess?” How
did problems get so complex and tangled?
Here in America, everywhere we look, more is going “wrong.” Systems are failing, jobs are drying up,
people are losing their homes, children are going hungry. And we are scrambling! We’re trying to climb out of our financial
holes, we’re trying to keep our homes, we’re disgusted with candidates who seem
to lampoon their way across debates, and we are angry. Remember the movie where the TV station head
leans out of the window and screams: “I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!” (Can’t remember the exact quote; am sure my
movie buddies will help me flesh it out.)
Stop a
minute and realize that we are speaking from here and now, from our current
situation, and we are filled with mixed emotions. Are you angry? Worried?
Fed-up? Cynical? Blasé?
“What me, worry” attitude? Or are
you confused, back-and-forth, up one moment and down another? Going in circles? Feeling sucked under by external events? Feeling ungrounded? DEPRESSED AND FEELING HELPLESS?
We
used to be able to pin our “hopes” on our idealized image of life, the security
of living in America (or not, if you are non-white, poor, homeless),
or taking the patient view “the pendulum swings back and forth, just wait,
it’ll come back and balance with it.” All
of these are “do-nothing” responses; in effect that conveys it’s not “MY responsibility!”
Many
people are just now having their assumptions shattered and are flailing because
there seems to be no solid ground on which to stand. And we’re still left with all of our deep
seated problems, not completely solved after all of these years. Racism, injustice, war, poverty, inequality,
destitution, corruption, greed, murder, are not only still with us but glaring
from the pages of the newspaper, and TV and internet screens more than
ever. It’s as if everything that has
been buried for years is surfacing and we can smell the decay and rot of
neglect.
And we look for things to
divert our attention, to give us momentary uplifts of laughter or fun when we
forget the mess we’re in. Then we
wake up the next day to the news of more systems failures, we can ignore our
escalating panic no longer, and finally admit our helplessness. We feel devoid of hope or at best a stoic
skepticism that things will ever get better.
You
may have not caught it yet, but what I am describing is the opposite of the
title that keeps running through my head about “How to Get There from Here.” How can we if we don’t know where “There” is? We don’t have a clear Vision of how we want
it to be. We haven’t taken time to think
about alternatives-beyond-the-quick-fix.
We just know we want “out” – yet – how can we move TOWARD something if
we don’t know what IT IS? And in too
many cases, we are afraid that we already have arrived at all-there-is. I don’t believe that!
This
is my epiphany for today: we have to look beyond our present to WHAT WE
WANT. We have to determine how we want
the world to look; how we want our lives to be.
What is worth fighting for? Not
just in the short-term, but in the long-term.
We have to have a VISION of the kind of world we want or
we won’t make it “out of Here/Today” in any better shape than we were yesterday. We’ve dug ourselves a hole and we
have a Choice. I have a choice of what I
do next year; you have a choice of what you do next year.
Actually
Humanity has a choice and this is a PRIME MOMENT to make a decision to change the
way we relate to each other and everyday life.
We can DO IT BETTER.
We
can’t do it better, until we’ve discovered how we screwed up. We can’t point fingers at others and neglect
looking into our own hearts and see where the “small” greed is, the casual
neglect, the small instant of malice, the everyday selfishness, the periodic snit
of superiority. We have to “own up” to
our part in the world’s seeming to plummet in a dangerous spiral downward. We can no longer say: “it’s them.” “It’s their fault.” “They made it happen.”
Like
it or not, we are all tied together.
Many a person has been quoted – include Martin Luther King – saying we
are all in this together. When one
person falls, we are all affected. If
one person can be jailed without cause, the same could happen to us. If we lose all our money because the market
fails and we become broke, we become “one of the poor.”
Our
illusions of grandeur, success, and safety are just that in our predominately-white-America. We can become diminished. We can fail.
We can fall prey and become unsafe.
And here in America, we are surprised that it can happen to us! When we thought we were better, we thought we
were untouchable. Our education, our
affluence, and our blindness to others’ needs kept us separate.
If we are male, if we are white, if we are
privileged to have had an easy life, we are probably much more shocked by what
is happening than others who are not and have not had a sheltered life. What is happening all over the world is a
great leveling and those of us who prided ourselves on being “us” not “them”
are having a rude awakening.
And,
being the “glass-half-full” kind of person I am, I see this leveling as a good
thing. Painful as it is, it is an
opportunity to seek each other out – across boundaries – and say, “uh, hi,
how’s it going? what do YOU think is going to happen? is there anything I can
do to help? do you suppose we can get together and move that boulder out of the
way – the boulder that is blocking both of us?”
This
means we’re all the 100%; we need all of us to make choices that will help
EVERYONE. And we can no longer afford to
think of ourselves as separate from the rest of the world.
In the
last several months, I have had at least 2 friends, in the middle of a
conversation, reach over and pat my arm, and smile while they say: “Oh
Marcella, you’re so sweet but you don’t get it; this is the way things
are. We can’t do anything about it. Don’t waste your energy.” The underlying message from the words and the
body language is: “poor thing, she really
things she can change things…she means well, she just needs to wake up to the
real world.”
Today,
on New’s Year Eve of 2011, I declare:
THERE IS A REAL WORLD
THAT HAS YET TO BE EMBRACED BY
HUMANITY...
AND I AM A BELIEVER.
Tomorrow,
on January 1, 2012, I will write about the REAL WORLD as I know it exists and
how that REAL WORLD can become
“the world in which we live
because we can
choose to make it so.”
Happy
almost 2012! Marcella
